This is… Tunng: Mother’s Daughter and Other Tales

Tunng have been quietly radical through their existence. Never hyped, always seemingly happy to be a cult act, they’ve deconstructed what it is to be a band over and over: members that aren’t members, poets in tow, an ever-changing lineup that went full circle over years, and a continual refusal of any duality of organic/electronic or retro/future. This is the album where they arrived fully formed, the glitches and crackles of turn of the millennium clicks-and-cuts electronica effortlessly made ancient-sounding as they were blended into gentle but devastatingly strange folky songs with dreamlike lyrics and hooks for days. “Timelessness” is a dubious concept as it leads to ahistorical thinking, but for the duration of this album it really feels like you’re transported somewhere just outside the normal flows of history and causation… Metaphysical sensations aside, though, it’s certainly in a space of its own.